Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience, newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation of intel­lectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially "Africana" in its centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance. A critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as "religion" apart from its inti­mate connections to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors the deep ruptures that have affected Afri­cana life and the creative responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

Transdisciplinary insights at the intersection of religion, democracy, ecology, and economy What is the relationship of religion to economy, ecology, and democracy? In our fraught moment, what critical questions of religion may help to assembly democratic processes, ecosystems, and economic structures differently? What possible futures might emerge from transdisciplinary work across these traditionally siloed scholarly areas of interest? The essays in Assembling Futures reflect scholarly conversations among historians, political scientists, theologians, biblical studies scholars, and scholars of religion that transgress disciplinary boundaries to consider urgent matters expressive of the values, practices, and questions that shape human existence. Each essay recognizes urgent imbrications of the global economy, multinational politics, and the materiality of ecological entanglements in assembling still possible futures for the earth. Precisely in their diversity of disciplinary starting points and ethical styles, the essays that follow enact their intersectional forcefield even more vibrantly.

A turn to the animal is underway in the humanities, most obviously in such fields as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. One important catalyst for this development has been the remarkable body of animal theory issuing from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. What might the resulting interdisciplinary field, commonly termed animality studies, mean for theology, biblical studies, and other cognate disciplines? Is it possible to move from animal theory to creaturely theology? This volume is the first full-length attempt to grapple centrally with these questions. It attempts to triangulate philosophical and theoretical reflections on animality and humanity with theological reflections on divinity. If the animal–human distinction is being rethought and retheorized as never before, then the animal–human–divine distinctions need to be rethought, retheorized, and retheologized along with it. This is the task that the multidisciplinary team of theologians, biblical scholars, philosophers, and historians assembled in this volume collectively undertakes. They do so frequently with recourse to Derrida's animal philosophy and also with recourse to an eclectic range of other relevant thinkers, such as Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Gloria Anzaldua, Helene Cixous, A. N. Whitehead, and Lynn White Jr. The result is a volume that will be essential reading for religious studies audiences interested in ecological issues, animality studies, and post-humanism, as well as for animality studies audiences interested in how constructions of the divine have informed constructions of the nonhuman animal through history.

In the face of globalized ecological and economic crises, how do religion, the postsecular, and political theology reconfigure political theory and practice? As the planet warms and the chasm widens between the 1 percent and the global 99, what thinking may yet energize new alliances between religious and irreligious constituencies? This book brings together political theorists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion to open discursive and material spaces in which to shape a vibrant planetary commons. Attentive to the universalizing tendencies of "the common," the contributors seek to reappropriate the term in response to the corporate logic that asserts itself as a universal solvent. In the resulting conversation, the common returns as an interlinked manifold, under the ethos of its multitudes and the ecology of its multiplicity. Beginning from what William Connolly calls the palpable "fragility of things," Common Goods assembles a transdisciplinary political theology of the Earth. With a nuance missing from both atheist and orthodox religious approaches, the contributors engage in a multivocal conversation about sovereignty, capital, ecology, and civil society. The result is an unprecedented thematic assemblage of cosmopolitics and religious diversity; of utopian space and the time of insurrection; of Christian socialism, radical democracy, and disability theory; of quantum entanglement and planetarity; of theology fleshly and political.

Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate "materiaphobically." Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world "He" created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, "enlightened" Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, "primitive," and "animist" non-Europe on the other. The "new materialisms" currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms-and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of "the new materialism." Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.

The essays in this volume ask if and how trinitarian and pluralist discourses can enter into fruitful conversation with one another. Can trinitarian conceptions of divine multiplicity open the Christian tradition to more creative and affirming visions of creaturely identities, difference, and relationality-including the specific difference of religious plurality? Where might the triadic patterning evident in the Christian theological tradition have always exceeded the boundaries of Christian thought and experience? Can this help us to inhabit other religious traditions' conceptions of divine and/or creaturely reality? The volume also interrogates the possibilities of various discourses on pluralism by putting them in a concrete pluralist context and asking to what extent pluralist discourse can collect within itself a convergent diversity of orthodox, heterodox, postcolonial, process, poststructuralist, liberationist, and feminist sensibilities while avoiding irruptions of conflict, competition, or the logic of mutual exclusion.

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge-that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology. While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt-and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics-the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Religion, Emotion, Sensation asks what affect theory has to say about God or gods, religion or religions, scriptures, theologies, and liturgies. Contributors explore the crossings and crisscrossings between affect theory and theology and the study of religion more broadly, as well as the political and social import of such work. Bringing together affect theorists, theologians, biblical scholars, and scholars of religion, this volume enacts creative transdisciplinary interventions in the study of affect and religion through exploring such topics as biblical literature, Christology, animism, Rastafarianism, the women's Mosque Movement, the unending Korean War, the Sewol ferry disaster, trans and gender queer identities, YA fiction, queer historiography, the prison industrial complex, debt and neoliberalism, and death and poetry. Contributors: Mathew Arthur, Amy Hollywood, Wonhee Anne Joh, Dong Sung Kim, A. Paige Rawson, Erin Runions, Donovan O. Schaefer, Gregory J. Seigworth, Max Thornton, Alexis G. Waller